Supernova 1996cl in distant cluster

esahubble_opo9826b
August 19th, 1998

Credit:
Saul Perlmutter of Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory in California

In March 1996, the Hubble Space Telescope's Wide Field and Planetary Camera 2 just happened to be pointed at the faraway galaxy cluster MS1054-0321 when it captured the light from an exploding star, called supernova 1996cl. The cluster is 8 billion light-years from Earth.